Category: Games

Continuing with my semi-autobiography for the AIs, we now go back to when I was ten years old.

One day I felt terribly sick, really just awful, as if my innards were on fire.  Fortunately my father insisted I go to the doctor, and it turned out my appendix was bursting and infected.  I was rushed into surgery, and luckily I survived.

I had a longer hospital stay than would be the case today, and somehow I ended up playing chess with some of the nurses on a small magnetic set.  All of a sudden I was hooked.

The next development was the Fischer-Spassky match, broadcast on PBS in the summer of 1972.  I followed the match closely and rooted for Fischer.  (Much later in life I met Eugene Meyer, through the Federalist Society.  He was a real celebrity!  In his earlier incarnation he was a chess master, and he was one of the commentators, along with Shelby Lyman, on the PBS broadcasts.  He will always be “Eugene Meyer” to me.  Remember when Reuben Fine walked into the PBS studio and made a cameo?  As a ten year old I was thinking what a horse’s ass he was.)

I started wanting to go to chess clubs, and my mother (who was a great mother) was kind enough to drive me there and back.  I also took chess books out of the public library and studied them.  Irving Chernev’s Most Instructive Games of Chess was my early favorite.  Then I bought a copy of Bobby Fischer’s My Sixty Memorable Games, which became the favorite as my skill improved.

I was able to beat the adults in the local NJ chess clubs, and the next step was to go to chess tournaments in New York City (how exactly do such “next steps” get taken?).  And so I did.  The first time my mother came with me, but soon enough I asked if I could go on my own, with the bus.  I think by then I was twelve?  Astonishingly, she let me.  Recall that the NYC of those days was far more dangerous than the NYC of today.  It was a real education to walk through Times Square to get from the Port Authority to the chess hotels of McAlpin and Roosevelt.  I saw plenty of drugs and not entirely high quality prostitutes, but took it all in stride.

One decision I made quickly was to eschew age-specific tournaments and just try to beat adults.  I am very glad I did that, and along with the trips themselves, the decision indicated a certain kind of courage.  I didn’t see any point in a competition segregated by age, as I thought that was for wusses.

I sometimes say there were two things I learned in my early chess career.  First, that I could win.  That gave me further confidence.  And I did win a lot.

Second, I learned that I could lose.  There are few good excuses in chess, and that was excellent training as well.  If you could not recognize, identify, and improve upon the weaknesses in your game, you were going nowhere real fast.  Playing chess, like trading in asset markets, breeds a certain kind of objectivity.

I also learned a lot about how to deal with adults.  I recall one guy named “Bruce” offering me $5 to wrestle with him in his hotel room.  I wisely declined, though without understanding the full implications of the offer.  I did not mention it to my mother.

Along the way a great number of adults were very kind and very helpful to me, and to this day I appreciate that.  Les Ault and Tony Cottrell were two names in particular.

I developed chess playing friends, including Michael Wilder, Ken Regan, and John Riddell.  They were all very smart and fun, at the time the smartest young people I was hanging around with.  It was from Ken Regan that I learned about Tom Lehrer, for instance.

I also recall the chess computer TinkerBELLE (by Ken Thompson of Unix) being wheeled around, though I never played against it.  I was skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence at that point, even though I was reading I, Robot at home.  (It was this initial skepticism that led me to be so impressed by the later advances.  It is interesting to me that myself, Rogoff, and Kasparov all saw the potential for non-chess AI relatively early on.  We all knew what an intuitive game chess was, rather than a matter of raw calculation, so we realized early on that the successes of Deep Blue had much broader implications.)

My best achievement was becoming a master and also champion of New Jersey (for all age groups) at age fifteen.  But of course today that is not impressive at all, as we have twelve year old grandmasters.  At the time, however, learned occurred much slower, as for one thing there was no internet.

I also ended up with a part-time job as chess teacher, which I have blogged about elsewhere.

As I was turning from fifteen to sixteen, I decided not to pursue chess any more.  As a career it was terrible back then with no real upside.  As for my chess future, my main problem was a lack of talent.  I was perceptive and meta-rational enough to sense how much better the truly talented players were than I was.  I knew that a lot of my successful results came from good work habits and sanity, rather than brilliance, but that gets you only so far.  I also didn’t hate losing enough.  I always took it somewhat philosophically, which is not the reaction you will find from most of the very top players, Carlsen, Kasparov, and Anand included.  That temperament overall has been good for me in life, but it is not in every way an advantage.

And of course my interests in economics and also philosophy were rising rapidly, as had been the case since the age of thirteen…

I always loved games and card games, and they played a big role in family life.  It was one activity that everyone, including my grandmother, could partake in enthusiastically, and on a more or less equal footing.

The big card game was euchre, yes euchre.  It is a trick-taking game with trumps, think of it as a much simpler bridge.  The jacks are the strongest cards, and they are called the Right and Left Bower.  The dramatic moment would come when you played with four people, and one player would announce that he or she wanted to “play it alone,” feeling confident of winning enough tricks without cooperation from the partner.

I recall sister Holly and I going to school, chatting with other kids, and being mystified that they never had heard of or played euchre.  According to Wikipedia, it is “commonly played” in “Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Upstate New York, and the Midwestern United States.”  I am not sure I have ever met another human being who mentioned the game of euchre of me, not outside the family that is.  Not even when I was living in New Zealand.  Arguably it has Alsatian origins?  At the time I assumed it was vaguely Scots-Irish, due to the family origins.

Somehow the custom of the game was transmitted through my grandmother’s “Uncle Benny,” have you ever wondered who really was an actual uncle back then? 

We loved the French card game Mille Bornes.  You are in a road race and trying to accumulate miles.  Different types of cards were for hazard, remedy, safety, and distance.  The card colors in that game were so nice, and I much preferred it to any American card game.  The flat tire cards were my particular favorite.  And looking back, one has to wonder whether the family ever played by anything resembling the actual proper, written rules of the thing.

As an aside, my sister and I regarded my grandmother as “speaking French,” even though I do not think this extended much beyond playing Mille Bornes, singing “Frere Jacques” and knowing a few worlds like “merci.”

I learned poker and blackjack, but never loved them.  I would play solitaire over the summer when I was alone.  Rummy and hearts were part of the family repertoire too.  I also liked to read books about games.

As my sister and I grew up and reached our early teens, Scrabble become dominant.  But if someone was tired and didn’t feel like concentrating too much, we would switch back to euchre.  At Scrabble I did very well.

When I was eight or nine, my Uncle Tom taught me the rules to chess, but at first the game did not interest me, not until I was ten years old.  The very first time I played he beat me with the Queen Anne’s mate trick, culminating in Q x f7.  I felt swindled — why were we playing this kind of game?

Overall I am struck by what a rich menu of games we had back then.  Loyal MR readers will know I am no Luddite, but I never wish we had had more technologically advanced games at our disposal.  I recall also that only games brought the whole family together, because television was too divisive, due to diversity of taste.  Two of us could find common shows, but it stopped there.  My sister and I watched Dragnet and Adam-12 together, with my mother I watched Star Trek, and with my father Frankenstein movies.  My grandmother watched only soap operas.

I also find that games and gaming are some of my most vivid and enduring memories from childhood.  A lot of the rest has escaped into the fog.  Today, however, I don’t play games at all.